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More specific terms for mass murder

The twentieth century has seen some of the greatest examples of mass murder, tragically. Instead of simply speaking of "mass murder", the word "genocide" is often used to refer to these incidents, especially in the case of killing all those of a particular ethnic group by their own government (see also democide, or ethnocide if the grouping is based on religion). According to Black's Law Dictionary, the term was popularized by the 1948 "Genocide Convention" of the United Nations, to deal with the special problems posed by the Holocaust, and international wishes to prevent a recurrence of the same.

It is strange to witness the passion with which some secular figures rail against the misdeeds of the Crusaders and Inquisitors more than 500 years ago. The number sentenced to death by the Spanish Inquisition appears to be about 10,000. Some historians contend that an additional 100,000 died in jail due to malnutrition or illness.

These figures are tragic, and of course population levels were much lower at the time. But even so, they are minuscule compared with the death tolls produced by the atheist despotisms of the 20th century. In the name of creating their version of a religion-free utopia, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong produced the kind of mass slaughter that no Inquisitor could possibly match. Collectively these atheist tyrants murdered more than 100 million people.[1]

Atheism and mass murder

Christian apologist Gregory Koukl wrote that "the assertion is that religion has caused most of the killing and bloodshed in the world.
There are people who make accusations and assertions that are empirically false. This is one of them."[6]
Koukl details the number of people killed in various events involving theism and compares them to the much higher tens of millions of people killed under atheisticcommunist regimes, in which militant atheism served as the official doctrine of the state.[6]

It has been estimated that in less than the past 100 years, governments under the banner of atheistic communism have caused the death of somewhere between 40,472,000 to 259,432,000 human lives.[7] Dr. R. J. Rummel, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii, is the scholar who first coined the term democide (death by government). Dr. R. J. Rummel's mid estimate regarding the loss of life due to communism is that communism caused the death of approximately 110,286,000 people between 1917 and 1987.[8]